AMD is in a very sad state. Complaining about the unfair advantages the competition has annoys me. How dare they to claim nvidia had an advantage? Is this the GPU Kindergarten or something? Nvidia laid open what they had six months ago while the AMD Gestapo forced NDAs down everyones throat and kept claiming to get the GTX killer going, boasting how fast and good it will be. Now the bad drivers are guilty of every shortcoming AMD made over the last decade. Everywhere everyone says "the drivers suck". Yes, right, probably they do suck, but that is no excuse.
I´m not trying to protect or Nvidia or any other corporation here - nv had a quite disastrous affair with their Vista drivers and they deserved every bit of trouble they got.
The 2900XT is, technologically speaking, a revolutionary piece of hardware. The tesselation feature alone makes it something very special and i really like what i can see AMD trying to accomplish.
Sadly, they failed.
6 months late, that´s, if someone believes the nvidia pr-propaganda, almost a whole generation in the video card industry, yet the cards performance isn´t one generation ahead of its competition but a whole generation behind (comparing GTX vs XT). And no, while the XT might be in the price range of the GTS, it is currently the fastest card AMD has to offer wich makes it the direct competitor of the GTX. At a price range of 350-450$ a lot of people will go the last step to and just buy the fastest they can get if it is only 50-100$ more.
AMD had a lot of time to prepare a good launch, but what they managed to achieve is a delayed XTX, underperforming drivers and some moaning about how nobody told them to optimize their drivers for some of the upcoming games.
The card itself might be a decent, maybe even a good piece of hardware. AMD just failed to understand that hardware alone is nothing. While i really hoped they could succeed, i´m not too surprised to see what i´m seeing.